Kamin: DePaul arena has distinctive look, challenging task

Expected winning design still needs work

September 22, 2013|Blair Kamin | Cityscapes

For months now, the proposed DePaul University basketball arena at McCormick Place has seemed as dubious as the notion that the Cubs might rally to win the pennant. After all, DePaul no longer draws the big crowds it did in the glory days of Ray Meyer, and the arena would be an inconvenient "L" trip away from the school's Lincoln Park campus.

If they build it, will anybody come?

Taking note of Chicago's rash of public school closings, critics also have questioned the wisdom of spending about $33 million in city funds on an arena whose beneficiaries will include a private university. Neighbors worry that the arena would inundate them with traffic and drunken fans. Their questions were: Should they build it? And, if so, where?

Sometimes, a design can be seductive enough to quell such debate. But the release of the expected winning design for the $173 million arena is unlikely to do so.

The plan, by the well-regarded New Haven, Conn., firm of Pelli Clarke Pelli, has several good strokes, including a transparent public face and a striking, skylight-pierced humpback roof that will shelter a could-be-fabulous interior. Yet it isn't strong enough to forestall the debate swirling around the arena, as leaders of the Metropolitan Pier and Exposition Authority, the city-state agency known as McPier that runs the convention center, undoubtedly had hoped.

The authority's board is all but certain Monday to approve a recommendation that it accept the plan, which emerged from a field of six finalists.

For an architecture buff, it's impossible to consider the winner without thinking of the "Yale Whale," a 1958 Eero Saarinen hockey rink in New Haven with an even more spectacular humpback roof. Cesar Pelli, a Saarinen protege and Pelli Clarke Pelli's founder, is intimately familiar with the "Yale Whale," whose official name is the Ingalls Rink.

The rink's great strength is that it is a total package of modern Expressionism. Its swooping, cable-supported roof, suspended from a reinforced concrete arch, evokes the motion of the skaters inside. Its oval floor plan has the practical advantage of putting everybody close to the action and enhancing the building's sculptural presence. If the rink has a fault, it's that it's more sculpture than architecture, ignoring the neighborhood around it.

The DePaul arena design goes too far in the other direction: It is better at embracing its environs than speaking in a coherent, compelling voice.

Planned for the northeast corner of Cermak Road and Indiana Avenue, the arena would rise just north of the sprawling convention center, an architecturally solid, if rather sterile, complex of buildings that has always seemed an island unto itself.

To its credit, McPier is trying to stitch the convention center into a vibrant entertainment zone that would be woven into the Motor Row historic district to the west. It also wants to use the arena, which it calls an "event center," for high school basketball tournaments, concerts, boxing matches, rodeos, meetings and speeches that won't fit into the convention center's 4,250-seat Arie Crown Theater. Two new hotels also are planned, including a projected 500-room facility on the same block as the arena. Because that building will serve as a vertical marker that calls attention to the arena on the skyline, it is essential that great care be given to its design.

There are a lot of parts here, and the fundamental challenge for the architects was putting them in the right place. At that, they've done well.

By shifting the planned hotel to the block's northeast corner, they prevented a high-rise canyon along Cermak. And by placing the arena's seating bowl more than 20 feet below street level, the architects make the building's profile less tall — and thus less domineering. McPier officials say a cul de sac and other traffic-control measures, such as one-way streets, will likely help buffer neighbors in the nearby Prairie Avenue historic district from being overrun with cars on game days.

The arena itself is correctly conceived as a block-filling, "streetwall" building, one that seeks to engage the sidewalks around it rather than retreating behind a moat of parking lots, as at the United Center. The vision is to have uses like a sports bar ringing the building's perimeter. You'll be able to look right through the bar into the arena's heart. Small pavilions, aglow at night, might contain restaurants and stores.

But it is easier to build storefronts than to fill them, as the empty spaces at Donald Trump's riverfront skyscraper show. And a planned sky bridge linking McCormick Place to the arena would contradict the idea of enlivening the streets.